Mark
by NoiseAndSound
Summary: "Darkness becomes a part of you. You know its every move, action, nuance. Lifting it is like lifting a part of yourself." Kingdom Hearts & Inception, KH-verse.


Title - Mark  
Word Count – 3,942 words  
Genre – Adventure/Introspective  
Character(s) – Sora, Kairi, Riku, D. Cobb and his team.  
Disclaimer - I do not own _Kingdom Hearts_, _Inception_,or any related characters. This was written out of pure enjoyment for the series, and no profit is being made.  
Notes – Kingdom Hearts and Inception crossover, KH-verse. Enjoy and review if you feel so. Constructive criticism is always very much appreciated.

* * *

Sora knows enough not to take chances like these for granted; intimidating and unfamiliar, but chances nonetheless. A way out, by all means; a solution, finally, to a problem befallen for far too long, something he wanted gone years ago. To move freely from under it and fully be rid of it will be the greatest relief.

And yet, this does not dissuade his caution.

So it is the small room the two of them are sitting in – altogether windowless and featureless, with a solitary light bulb casting shadows against the concrete walls – that provides some comfort, for its solidarity if nothing else. Rarely does Sora need to feel grounded (literally or figuratively) but…this is different. So very different.

Kairi knows it too; the way she continuously arranges their notes, even when they sit stacked on the table, alphabetized by subject, neat little rectangles of text; the way she runs equations and figures again and again, as if some unknown result will suddenly appear and disprove their scrupulous assumptions; the way she clips her slightly frazzled hair – curled just barely in the humidity – into a disorganized bun, smoothes the thoroughly flat pleats of her blouse. It takes quite a bit of something to push her to the limits of composure, but this is quite a bit of something after all.

Sora sighs and sits on the edge of the table nearest to where she is seated, leaning forward as to purposefully obscure the carefully drawn out maps and tables and take her hands. They are trembling; it takes this for him to notice that his are, too.

He tries to be assured. "Everything will be _fine_."

She casts him an almost imploring glance, offset with the quirk of an eyebrow. She doesn't believe him, he knows; she's seen too much, he's seen too much. She tucks their interlaced fingers under her chin and sighs heavily. Several crumpled sheets of paper fall to the mottled floor.

"I'm not the one who needs convincing."

.-.

"You're going to go through with this, right? We need your word on this Riku, we can't have –"

"I know."

"We want this just as much as you do. Yeah, you wanted to get it done yourself, but –"

"_Sora_." Kairi grasps his wrist, looking up from the mess of floor plans they moved from the joint room and have spread on the table.

"No, no…he's right. I just…I thought it would be all over. I _want_ it to be over, and I wanted to end it. I'm just tired of others interfering all the time, especially you two. And this…_team_? What do they think they'll find…" He trails into silence, but the unspoken words remain between them; _I was manipulated, possessed, constrained, and that's what they will find. Weakness._

Having given up on organizing the pile of documents into some semblance of order, Kairi moves towards him; she places one hand on the small of his back, against the cotton of his sweatshirt, and one on his arm. She has to stand on tiptoe to meet his gaze – his faraway, wishful stare – and he supposes that he can take comfort in her gesture.

"I've always told you," she murmurs – how uncharacteristic it is for Kairi to _murmur_ – "…you can't get through everything by yourself. This is why you need us, right? And we need them. You know what we're willing to do for you."

Sora has moved over to the window, undoubtedly savoring the scant breeze that filters from the bustling city below. His shoulders hunch as he runs his fingertips over the splintered window sill, disgruntled.

Riku bites back a laugh at Kairi's statement, a joyous sound that doesn't reach his distant gaze. "I think I know that a little too well."

.-.

By the time Cobb's team arrives, the temperature in the room has risen an uncomfortable several degrees, forcing Sora to remove his jacket and continue to hang precariously out the window. He starts when they enter the room – he wants to make a good impression, after all – and walks forward, extending a hand towards the focused, quiet man he assumes is their extractor.

"This may be two jobs," Cobb says, voice brimming with a hard confidence that Sora doesn't dare cross, "but my team is here for information. Your friend…" – he glances at Riku, who is now helping their chemist untangle the long tubes that will attach to the synchronizer – "You need to understand that it is not their highest priority to eliminate his…_condition_. I may have taken a vested interest in this case, but that doesn't mean that I can dictate what our priorities demand." Sora nods; it chills him deeper than anything, but he understands. Their innumerable skills make this possible in the first place; Sora can only tag along, wait for the ideal window of opportunity, and strike. It's the best they can do, working with a compromise.

Riku, having apparently heard their exchange, snorts. "It can't just be for whatever's in my head. I'm not _that_ valuable."

Cobb inclines his head, resting his fingers against the metal of the table in a resigned manner. "The usual; money, curiosity, the thrill of some challenge. At least, it's thrilling for some."

"Not for you?"

A heavy silence falls between them, and something seems to strain at Cobb's resolve, but then it's gone. "It gets the job done," he says, ambiguously.

Maps already litter a section of the floor, piled on top of the documents Kairi had acquired – Ariadne's, he concludes, watching her and the tall, suit-clad point man – Arthur – conference over a suitable environment. Riku takes a seat near them, jotting down plans and points of emphasis.

Having reached an agreement, Cobb joins Arthur and Ariadne in their discussion, leaving Sora to stand alone with his thoughts in the spartan room.

"Why do these designs have to be so complicated?" Kairi asks, peering over Ariadne's shoulder. "Doubtful he'll be hard to find –"

"Unless you want his rogue projections running you to the ground," Arthur intones flatly. "Doubtful _you'll_ be hard for them to find, turning his subconscious upside down."

Kairi falls silent, meeting Sora's observant gaze. His lips twitch into a smile – _relax_.

"You're not going to turn on us, pretty boy, are you?" their forger addresses to Riku, prowling nonchalantly about the room.

Riku stiffens, pausing in his note-taking, but Sora detects a level of mirth in his response. "I don't think I could if I tried. He's the one calling all the shots down there."

"Then we'll need to move fast," Cobb says, interrupting Eames' retort, eyes still trained on the floor plans. "As few dreamers as possible. Once you make your move, Sora, we won't have long to get out of the second level before it destabilizes."

His tone is calm as he addresses Sora – unnervingly so.

They are two sides of the same coin, both committed to their motive; yet for Cobb to speak so nonchalantly of things Sora can hardly understand, embarking through the tumultuous, volatile dreamscape – Sora can only acknowledge how little he knows going into the mission. It scares him half to death, the level of sophistication with which they handle such unfamiliarity.

They conference for much of the day, taking brief breaks to sip tepid coffee (Riku adds copious amounts of processed sugar to his) and discuss a myriad of topics of varying generality and absurdity while Yusuf finalizes their compound (Arthur spins a rather morbidly bizarre one detailing the military's use of dreamscape as a training ground) and, all too quickly, the day has waned into afternoon, the floors and walls are dappled with deep orange; they finalize their logistics, scratched out on the back of a crumpled memo.

Arthur will be their first dreamer, with Riku populating the dreamscape with his projections, including – if their luck holds – a manifestation of their mark. The majority of the team will stay behind on the first level, as a measure of stability if anything – only Sora and Cobb will enter the second level, the most volatile and entirely unpredictable of the two. It's unfathomably challenging, and Sora once again feels that scant sense of luck that – through some slim chance – the extractor they are paired with is as intent on reaching Sora's goal as he is his own.

While Arthur draws chairs for the five of them who will enter the dream, Sora tugs Kairi aside.

"You'll stay close to me?" His gaze darts cautiously from her face to the organization of chairs that surround the open briefcase, as if it is the most terrifying thing he has seen.

"Sora…"

"I need to know. Please."

"We're dropping into our friend's subconscious – into a _dream_, at that – where we may as well be killed, where we could damage –"

"That's what I'm worried about."

Kairi bites her lip, because as odd as it is for daring, intrepid Sora to linger so heavily on pitfalls, he's making a valid point.

"They've done this a thousand times, and what are we doing? Just tagging along, hoping that someway, somehow, we _might_ be able to –"

"We _will_ be able to," Kairi retorts. "Cobb and the team can take care of themselves. I can take care of myself, and anyways, you're going in as blind as I am." She smiles, ruefully. "We trust them, or we've got nothing."

.-.

Sora feels a slight kick of nostalgia when they drop into the first level; the hotel Arthur has designed would almost be unfamiliar, if not for the obvious intrusions of Xehanort's influcence; rusted pipes jut from the crumbling walls of the entrance hall in several erratic places, spilling streams of water onto the mottled marble floors, and – to Sora's disarray – a thin layer of shadow curls at their feet. It is as if, in a swing of poorly-made architectural decisions, someone stitched an elegant marble façade over the desolating ruins of Hollow Bastion.

"Well," Cobb mutters, lifting a shoe and watching the shadows cling weakly to it, "this is new."

Sora can't help but roll his eyes as Riku chuckles.

A vaulted ceiling extends a hundred feet above their heads, and Sora realizes that the rays of sunlight that mottle the floor are a fault of the cracking, crumbling stone through which he can see the brilliantly blue sky. Something crunches under his sneakered feet; trios of lancet windows that light the entrance hall have been smashed in, littering the floor with reflective fragments.

Riku's projections – clerks and maids, suit-clad businessmen and typical hotel goers – seem altogether docile as everyone regroups. Sora finds his gaze moving from figure to figure, processing their blank stares – he feels more obtrusive than ever, and more threatened by something that, for all intents and purposes, is entirely intangible; yet he also feels too burdened to question it. All in all, a threat is a threat.

They slowly prowl through the innumerable hallways that branch off from the hall, forgoing the use of weapons while the docile projections stream around them. Nonetheless, Sora moves cautiously, half-expecting one (or a countless many) to lunge in their direction, eyes yellowed. They don't.

It's when they find Xehanort that things take a drastic turn.

He is docile, clad in – oddly enough, so that Sora double-takes to make sure they have the right mark – a suit and tie, on a decorative couch near a window – the glass miraculously unscathed and intact, considering the decrepit state of surrounding architecture – but the projections launch themselves at the team with unprecedented furiousness.

The Keyblade, Sora discovers – as he slashes down at a maid seemingly intent on strangling him – seems to work just as well as firearms at inhibiting the projections; he and Kairi weave through the hostile masses almost recklessly, reaching the passive Xehanort. Riku, he notices, has hung back with Arthur and Cobb, rapidly clearing the hallway.

"We need to get into one of the rooms!" Riku intones, hacking furiously at a particularly crazed projection that bears down on him. Sora is closest, reorienting from his position near their mark and moving hastily across the hallway to one of the doors. He lays a hand against the doorknob and it swings inward with a click; the five of them shove the uncharacteristically inert body into the room and onto the bed, splayed against the pristine coverlet.

"You'd think he would put up a little more…resistance," Arthur addresses Sora, snapping open the briefcase, but it's Riku who answers him.

"He's probably waiting for us to get close," he says, checking that the door is locked (not that any modifications would be of much help, if the enraged sounds issuing from the other side are any indication) and helping to brace it with Kairi. "Get where we're most vulnerable, and he's most advantageous."

"Makes sense," Cobb mutters, making a final check on the synchronizer and compound. Riku laughs solemnly.

"Darkness becomes a part of you. You know its every move, action, nuance. Lifting it is like lifting a part of yourself."

There's the slightest pause in Cob's movement – a hiccup in motion – but then Arthur clears his throat (rather lacking in subtlety) and they're at work again. Sora rapidly rolls up one of his sleeves, tearing his eyes away from the disturbingly still form of their mark. The assault from the other side of the door becomes almost unbearable, and Riku spins on his heel to face the oncoming surge. "We've got it covered."

Sora can only hope, because the room is already dimming.

.-.

They are alone on the next level.

A single hallway twists through what Sora can only describe as the ruins of some long-forgotten palace, crumbling piles of marble merged with massive gardens of dieing flora and eerily quiet courtyards. Decrepit statues and moldy oil paintings, once lustrous in some other time, litter the hall, and the two of them must step lightly to avoid knocking against some fallen object that will give them away. But only creaking structural sounds – the groan of a floorboard, a tick as a wall settles into itself – greet their prowling traipse; no projections, thankfully, but also no mark.

Eventually they come upon a pair of heavy, archaic-looking doors, impossibly intact amongst the rubble. Sora lays a hand against the moldy wood and Cobb nods, weapon already drawn. They push. The doors are unlocked; they swing inwards with a guttural scraping noise, the sound of un-oiled hinges creaking and wood grazing marble floor. Sora winces and grits his teeth against the noise, almost falling forwards into whatever black abyss they have unveiled.

The room yawns with impossible hugeness, or at least Sora senses that it does, because the farthest wall and corners are obscured by twisting shadows. He just barely makes out a massive staircase that rises into the blackness, white marble nearly indistinguishable in the half-light that filters through ceiling high windows; the stairs seem to lead up towards twisting balconies that circle the entire perimeter, tattered cloth that must have once been an elegant tapestry hanging dully over the crumbling railing. Almost unnaturally, a freestanding armoire remains erect among the rubble. Silence fills every corner of the place, entrenching it in faux serenity, but experience knows better; the Keyblade coalesces in Sora's clenched fist as he peers into the shadows that blanket the other side of the vacuous hall.

"Your information –" he jerks his head towards the ornate armoire, "is probably –" but Cobb cuts him off.

"There's hardly any defenses," he says, gun drawn, eyes focused deep into the other side of the room as if his gaze could permeate the cloud of roiling darkness. "Are you sure that –"

"He's not after _you_," Sora realizes, a twinge of fear in his voice, and the full horror of his statement becomes clear only moments later.

A distorted roar issues from the twisting, inky blackness, and thundering towards them come waves upon waves of projections, clad not as pedestrians but dripping in shadows, clothes torn and ragged. Yellowed, piercing eyes lock onto Sora, who rocks back, twirling the Keyblade artistically to gather magical charge, and screams at Cobb to _move_. The extractor is already two steps ahead of him, sprinting in the direction of the armoire, undeterred by the incongruity of it all, and Sora stabs the Keyblade into the masses.

The hairs on the back of Cobb's neck lift for a moment as a wave of energy sweeps through the hallway, and through the mass of crazed projections; they are thrown against the high walls, through the windows, back into the inky shadows where they emerged, but their numbers seem innumerable. Gasping for breath, Sora shakily reorients and begins slashing through the oncoming figures, working his way through to the other side of the room.

The shadows are thickest there, someplace between solid and gaseous, but they thin as the projections do, and Sora starts, almost slipping on the marbled floors; it is as if something is calling them to cease, for now they stand immobile instead of attacking. A chill runs down his spine, and at Cobb's yell he turns towards the blanketed staircase. _Something_ is clawing its way towards them from the base of the ramp, straightening up on human legs and moving ponderously towards them; it steps forward from the swirling, dissipating shadow into a beam of filtered, hazy light, and at last Sora sees Xehanort.

He is no longer dressed in a suit under the guise of blending in or decorum, but in a sweeping cloak that billows around him like smoke – it is tattered and tangled like his hair, still lustrous silver, but long and ragged, hanging in front of piercing orange eyes. Stiff boots that encase his calves become visible as he steps forward – not with hurry but fierce resolve – and raises a featureless blade; in one solid, sweeping motion, he brings it down towards Sora.

A resounding _CLANG _echoes through the hall, reverberating off the far walls and balconies as Sora blocks and backpedals. The figure raises his weapon and strikes heavily, again and again, against Sora's; the impact sends shocks through his body and he skids backwards, fighting for traction on the smooth floors. A sneakered foot finds a protrusion in the tiles and, gathering as much strength as he can, Sora hurls himself back at the figure, gripping the Keyblade tightly. At the zenith of his jump, he swings it upwards, bellowing an incantation, and uses the same momentum to bring his weapon down on Xehanort's torso.

Lightning crackles and rains down from the heavens, momentarily illuminating the massive hall, but through the obscuring haze of shadow a clawed hand emerges; it snags Sora's collar and, in a sweeping circular motion, hurls him in the opposite direction. The wall rears up to greet him far too fast, and they collide with a shuddering crack – Sora crumples, pain blossoming acutely in his shoulders alongside the pounding of adrenaline.

"Dammit," he wheezes, rubbing at his throat, suddenly finding himself viewing the room from a higher perspective; he has been heaved atop one of the crumbling balconies, littered with rubble and rippling cloth, the decorative balustrade nearly obliterated. Xehanort, peering menacingly around the room, hasn't moved; but Cobb has, stuffing a handful of documents into his jacket and drawing his weapon.

"Intruder," the shadow-drenched figure snarls, his voice echoing throughout the chamber. "The light in your heart gives you away!"

Moving quietly through the rubble, Cobb finds Sora's gaze and gives a curt nod; Sora returns it, gathering his shaky legs underneath him to rise into a semi-standing position. Caution and deep, logically-seated fear twist in his gut, even as he tries to brush it off, except it's like brushing off permanent marker – Kairi will kick him later for this, he knows.

Cobb fires several bullets in quick succession; they barely clip the prowling figure of Xehanort, but the distraction is enough – he rounds on Cobb, a rippling growl rising in his throat and raising his weapon to slash blindly.

Sora launches himself off the balcony.

His body twists as his hands grasp for the tattered curtains, rapidly slowing his momentum but shuddering and straining against his weight; the whole balustrade seems to groan and tremble, threatening to crumble into an even more decrepit state, but Sora's gaze is fixed on Xehanort's lumbering back as his feet touch down. He hits hard and rolls haphazardly, shoulders screaming in acute agony, but adrenaline sets him up and running in an instant. The sound of his sneakers smacking against the marbled floor reverberates through the hall – Xehanort turns, face twisted into a malevolent snarl, scorching orange eyes flashing; his clawed hands reaching forward, and horrid shadows descend across the hall.

Sora hurls the Keyblade desperately. Before Xehanort's enraged scream can meet his ears, his weapon meets its mark.

Real and surreal, in an instant, shatter.

.-.

"Well," Riku says with finality, snapping the briefcase closed, "I can definitely say I won't be doing that again any time soon."

Sora smiles amicably, running his fingers over the crumbling brick exterior of the warehouse. "Definitely worth it hearing you say that. Not exactly conventional, but it gets the job done, right?" He echoes Cobb's ambiguity, and his reserved manner in the face of a job…not entirely well done, but accomplished nonetheless, and that's as much as they can hope for.

"Nothing like a killer headache to end the day. Let's see how _you_ hold up the next time I get a hold of Roxas," Riku says, snorting derisively. Kairi rolls her eyes, only a little perturbed, pausing in her chat with Ariadne to facetiously elbow him in the side.

They have gathered in the fading light of the sunset, a mixed multitude slowly filtering away in autumn's soft hold. Sora is still hesitant to don his jacket; the air is heavy around them, hazy in the afternoon light. And he feels heavy himself, almost uncomfortably guileful, as if this new level of espionage has somehow opened a world full of horrifying possibility. But he will face that when he comes to it; now, it is enough to simply be back in the company of associates, whole and intact.

Inquiry, however, still burns in the back of his throat as he taps Arthur on the shoulder – Cobb has already packed the team's sedative case, exchanging a few words with an impatient-looking Eames before glancing hurriedly at his watch, and Sora has the feeling that he is more intent on receiving their next mark than waiting out another conversation.

"Why," Sora says, rocking on the balls of his feet, "did he do this? Riku was right, the information he has…" But Arthur holds up a hand and he trails away.

"Cobb can relate," he says, "and that's more convincing for him than any thrill or amount of money." Sora's brow creases in confusion as Arthur starts to turn away.

"He and your friend," Arthur says with a heavy sigh, inclining his head in Riku's direction, "they…harbor something we can't begin to know. They're more similar than you think."

With that, he turns towards the purpling sunset; down the streets dimming in the rapidly fading light, where the irreparable shadows grow.


End file.
